I’ve had occasion to observe before that Winston Churchill had the right instincts about courtroom prosecutions for our most monstrous wartime enemies. American progressives insisted that such proceedings would imbue the inevitable executions with what they saw as a desirable tinge of judicial propriety. Such trials, the prime minister repined, “would be a farce.”
There are certain rudimentary assumptions about what a trial, as understood in the Anglo-American tradition, should be. If we are not prepared to grant them, to insist on them as the guarantor of equal protection under the law in a free society, then the exercise — whatever we may want to call it — is not a trial. It’s a theater production. It’s a way for the regime to masquerade as virtuous while the accused receives just a simulacrum of justice, and society’s rule of law erodes.
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